Kony 2012: Joseph Kony & the Facebook Video

Updated on March 8, 2012

You don't know much, if anything about him. Why would you in your insulated part of whatever world you are in. You go to work, cook meals, be with your family, watch movies, go shopping, pay bills. This is probably 95% of the world's daily routine.

But not for Joseph Kony. His daily routine since 1986 is to kidnap, enslave, create sex slaves out of young girls. make young boys soldiers in his Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which has nothing to do with anything but himself. His kingdom of African soldier boys and girls who provide sex service to him and his "troops". His LRA has no mission but to cause mayhem and destruction in Uganda. Congo, Sudan. The scary thing is, he looks totally normal if he was standing next to you in New York, LA, Mumbai, Moscow, Berlin or any of the small towns throughout the world.

He kidnaps his victims and forces the kids to murder their parents. Once this occurs, the kids are his. Isolated. Nowhere to go for shelter and food. Only in Africa could this even occur. The worse part, Mr. Kony has been doing this since 1986. Madonna was not even famous then. Since then, 30,000 kids have been ripped from their parents and homes and forced into deeds that ruin their lives forever.

The girls grow up within the army as sex slaves. They are beaten and raped at whim by the boys or men. Some girls also become foot soldiers, but their primary purpose is to provide sex upon being ordered to do it. For the boys, it is an outlet and perk for their pillage of towns and murder to control an area in Uganda or Sudan.

In 2005, Kony was the #1 warlord to be hunted for on the International Criminal Court. Yet, he is evasive. In 2011, Obama sent 100 US military advisors to assist locals in tracking him down. Consider this, if there was a person like him in anywhere but Africa, doing what he is doing, it would have ended a long time ago, but this is Africa, a backwater-third world area that is like a dumping ground for others. To be fair, both the Ugandan and Sudanese military have had their share of atrocities in the past. Also, the LRA is NOT conquering areas of Africa, they are actually fleeing areas once occupied by them-they are a band of criminals.

The Kony 2012 video (viewed over 16 million times) creates a false impression about this because Invisible Children, a organization who has targeted him, wants your donation.

One would think that finding this roving army of kids and their leader would be easy. Not so. Kony is staying in the dense jungles of Africa now and is no longer in Uganda (he left in 2006) and is now in extremely remote areas of the DRC, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. His LRA army comprises of only a few hundred kids, not 30,000 (which is the total since 1986 he has kidnapped).

Between 1999 and 2004, large hordes of children took refuge on the streets of Gulu, a town in Uganda, to escape the horrors of abduction and brutal conscription to the ranks of the LRA. It now has the highest rate of AIDS and prostitutes. While the LRA remains at large, the Ugandan government itself has a dismal record for human rights and it is not a democracy, as it has had the same president for 25 years, through a series of rigged elections.

Only 31 per cent of Invisible Children’s charity dollars go to helping Ugandans, according to an audit of the organization by Considine and Considine. The charity started in 2003 when three 20-something filmmakers went to Africa. It is based in San Diego, CA.

While the Kony 2012 video on the Internet is important for awareness purposes, local law enforcement in Uganda and Sudan have been after Kony for years. His LRA shadows when compared to the millions killed in Darfur and Rwanda. The video tends to skew this and makes Kony more than he is - a middle aged criminal with a band of teens\kids armed with AK-47s and RPGs, numbering a few hundred, running and hiding in the jungles to avoid capture.

Comments 2 comments

Nice you hit the nail on the head PerryA! Joseph Kony is a turd and needs to be caught but the bigger picture here is that the west wants an excuse to wage war in Africa. It's no coincidence that oil has been found in that region 5 years ago and now, 25 years after Kony started his LRA there a propaganda film that has the world howling for his blood. They don't want to save the children they want to destabilize the nation further.

perrya 4 years ago Author

According to those in Uganda, the Kony 2012 film, is 15 years too late. Kony, to them, is a spent force of a few hundred now fleeing and hiding in the jungles. Those living there are not at all afraid of Kony now because he left in 2006. The filmmakers made a film for $350K, years ago, this is their "calling card" also to show hollywood studios for feature films. Still, it is a good thing.